Suicide is the way of the poet. It is the loneliest road and the pathless wood.
Sylvia Plath composed “Death & Co.” on November 14, 1962, four months before her suicide. The poem concludes:
I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a start,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.Somebody’s done for.
Emily Dickinson writes: “Because I could not stop for death – He kindly stopped for me.”
Final accounts of the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton each suggests a race between a life and its death: to stop for death before death can stop for each life. It is a hunt. A haunting.
A. Alvarez wrote A Savage God, in part, finally to confront the suicide of his friend Sylvia. Records suggest that toward the end she wrote at a demonic pace, producing effortlessly up the three poems a day as a burning away.
Maxine Kumin writes of her friend and collaborator Sexton, that between January and February 1973, a year before her death, “the poems were coming at the rate of two, three, and even four a day, the awesome pace terrified me.”
Kumin continues: “The Sexton who had so defiantly boasted in her Ms. Dog phase, ‘I am God la de dah,’ had now given way to a ravaged, obsessed poet fighting to put the jigsaw pieces of the puzzle together into a coherence that would save her.” [2]
Bjerg calls this the “monomania” of writing. Dante begins the Inferno with a confession and admission, that midway through life’s journey he had arrived in a dark forest without direction. The path was one of suicide.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say what was this forest savage, rough, and stern, which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more.
In Canto XIII in his journey through Hell, Dante discovers this little more that is death that is the fate of suicides. It is the Seventh Circle as the “pathless wood that twisted up from Hell’s broken floor.” Here suicides have become trees of thorns and misery that cry out in parole e sangue, a mix of words and blood.
Suicide is Walter Benjamin, the little angel blown backwards from history, surveying the wreckage left behind.
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[1] Sylvia Plath, “Death & Co,” in The Collected Poems.
[2] Anne Sexton, Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, xxxi.
[3] Dante, Inferno I & XIII